Ghosts That We Knew
by Prof. Lemonade
Summary: In the wake of the Battle of the Bastards, and the proclamation of the North's fealty to the Starks once more, Jon and Sansa see the ghosts of their family all-around. Sometimes, it becomes difficult to separate the past from the present when so many that they love are dead. A series of vignettes based around "nostalgia", and the comparisons between Jon, Sansa, and the Starks.


**Summary:** In the wake of the Battle of the Bastards, and the proclamation of the North's fealty to the Starks once more, Jon and Sansa see the ghosts of their family all-around.

Sometimes, it becomes difficult to separate the past from the present when so many that they love are dead.

A series of vignettes based around "nostalgia", and comparing Jon and Sansa to Ned, Catelyn, and the rest of the Starks.

 **Title:** Ghosts That We Knew

* * *

 **i. Jon**

 _But the ghosts that we knew made us black and all blue_

 _But we'll live a long life_

"You look like father," she says, lifting her chin, although her voice sounds hollow in the dark cavern of the great hall. What once was warm and homely, lit in gold and orange by a lively fire, died long before men laid down to die beyond the gates. Shadows cling to the corners like cobwebs; death hangs stale and repugnant in the air.

It's not like the two of them do not know the taste; her like lemon cakes, him like staunch, watery Wall ale. It's a flavour hard to scrape from the tongue; a veneer slathered across the walls of the place they once called a home that will take more than hard-cast iron to chisel away.

Jon stops, and turns back to look at Sansa with that half-hunched posture he has mastered so well in the years he has been away. His eyes are dark; his hairline is tarred with dried blood and matted dirt that he hasn't had chance to scrub away.

He feels small in that instance, and despite the gloom that filters in through the veil of grey clouds and dust-bitten windows, he feels his shadow shrink.

"Don't say that," he says, voice gruff and harsh. He's not angry - Sansa knows that - just tired. Weary to his bones. Maybe he's started to decay from the inside out at last, and his body wants to fester. He's been to death's door and back that he wouldn't be surprised if he were lugging around a corpse; the lead in his arms and legs, the taste of blood at the back of his throat, the simpering emptiness that lingers in his chest now that the rage has subsided as a tide: it all feels like death enough.

Sansa holds her head high, and walks past him, steps swept but cloak heavy, clinging to her ankles. He is reminded of Catelyn Stark in that instance, of her grace, of her pride, of her resentment. He is reminded of the way she'd scold Arya for bludgeoning herself into their games in the courtyard, but would never address him. He is reminded of the way her eyes would always skim over him, never straying upon his face, to land on Robb. He is reminded of Rickon being born, and Catelyn not permitting him to see the new baby for the course of a full moon out of fear of him catching some summer cold, despite Jon's half-siblings slipping in and out of the nursery unabated.

Rickon. Oh, Rickon. Catelyn would hate him more now, and more justly, it would seem. She was right all along; he let her youngest die.

He is reminded of how it was never Ned's welcoming Jon, and never Robb's teasing Snow, and always her placeful Jon Snow. Winterfell is not his. It was the place he grew up, but not his. Not like it's Sansa's, or Bran's, wherever he is now, or Arya's, if she still lives. He should find solace in that; he has won for Sansa her home, he has given back to her the start of what was lost, he has done some penance to the spirit of Catelyn Stark, who he still feels hover on his shoulder, asking him if he feels like he belongs yet-

"Jon," Sansa says then, and he blinks; looks up at her in earnest. She stands upon the dias, one, gloved-hand resting on the arm-rest of Ned Stark's great, mahogany chair. She looks back at him, and her eyes aren't Tully blue, they're winter blue; he should've noticed sooner. She has Catelyn's red hair, and long neck, and fierce glare, and he has Ned Stark's stubbled jaw, and broad shoulders, and grey eyes, and perhaps if someone were to walk in now, they would claim to see the ghosts of the crypt thirty-feet down come out from rest.

Jon knows they are but shadows of the past; poor replicas of dead lords; pawns in the long game. Sansa looks noble against the hardwood of Ned Stark's northern throne; she looks like a ruler, carries herself like a Queen, Jon thinks. She would not look out of place with a dozen, frozen lords bending at the knee before her. He thinks then that she is more their father than him.

Despite the flagstone beneath his boots, and the ache in his battle-born and blood-battered bones, and the bodies he has clawed his way through to be standing between these long-forgotten walls, Winterfell still feels far away from here.

* * *

 **ii. Sansa**

 _But I will hold as long as you like_

 _Just promise me we'll be alright_

"I'm having the Lord's chambers prepared for you."

"Mother and Father's room?" Jon nods; Sansa frowns. "You should take it."

Jon's lips press into a thin line, his grey gaze roaming over the snow - covered hills, once red and angry with the blood of spilled men who could not be put to rest.

There's more than what he says; there always is. He has Ned's honesty, and yet he holds words on his tongue, branded somewhere on his body the thought he should not speak unless spoken to. His bastardry cuts him as deep as the wounds that litter his chest. (He had shown Sansa, at Castle Black. Well, not shown . She had caught him dressing, walking into his quarters with a familiarity she had thought she had not yet earned, and found him with his tunic unbuttoned, hanging sweat-damp across his broad shoulders. She had brought a hand to her lips, unable to conceal the shock at the vicious, angry knife wounds, scattered as crescent-moon-shaped gashes across his ribs. But he had been too tired to care for her blue eyes wide and disbelieving upon his battered breast, shrugging off her shock with an world-bearing heave, and asking her to take supper with him beyond the scrutiny of his brothers still in black.)

He doesn't say it, not out right, but the thought of sleeping in their Father's bed repulses him in a way that goes beyond the scope of wind-muffled words. She sees it in his happy grin - Father always promised, didn't he? - stretched taught with something pained that Sansa is all too apt at reading.

She does not push it, a part of her glad to be given her parent's chambers, proud to be recognised as the Lady of Winterfell, smug at the thought that it was her hand that saved them on the battlefield.

She does not push it, because she knows Jon Snow does not believe himself worthy of the seat of the Young Wolf, of Ned Stark, of the wild wolfen kings who came before, despite the battles he has won and the horrors he has endured.

She does not push it, because she sees in his eyes the wavering disbelief as Lady Mormont, Lord Manderly, Lord Cerwyn stand and raise their swords to the ceiling as torches, proclaiming him King in the North. She sees the fear amidst the conquest and the victory, and knows then that Jon Snow is scared of dying like the rest of them. King in the North means unity, means strength, means loyalty, but it has betrayed all those who came before. He simpers on the threshold between manic disbelief and manic despair, some part of him overjoyed, some part of him jumbled, all parts of him overwhelmed.

She offers him a quiet smile, firm and reassuring, but it dies a snuffed-out death with one glance at Petyr Baelish in the corner, picking at threads to find holes. Jon has a plenty, and it makes him vulnerable, like Father was. Jon still trusts people. Jon doesn't trust himself. Jon is scared of living. Jon is scared of dying. Jon smiles like he's terrified of doing so; like he won't have reason to curl his lips in five more minutes.

Jon is haunted. Their family meant different things to her.

She tells him to take Robb's quarters, because they're the second grandest. She sits with Jon in the solar, watches his shoulders fall, rides the whistle of the ill-concealed breath that deflates his chest. She can tell he feels more at peace here; has fond memories of sneaking ale and listening to Robb boast about girls. Some of the lines of perpetual worry that crease his forehead seem to dissipate and he looks his age for once.

He is still learning how to be a man, when she has been a woman for too many years already. She's the last one left, and there's a mantle to fill.

Sansa supposes that's exactly why she insists, You are to me , when he tries to tell her that he's not a Stark. It's a little bit selfish. She wants to share the responsibility, but thinks not of what it might do to him.

But Jon is naive; parts of him are still a boy, despite how much he wills to quash them. The parts of him that aren't Ned, they are Robb instead. Are Bran, are Arya. Are even little Rickon. He shoulders the burden of all their shadows much more obliquely than her.

She takes the mistakes of Ned and Catelyn Stark, and rises above them. He is buried beneath them, and all the people he couldn't save. Blood still soaks the fields beyond them, and the crypts below them.

Shadows move in Winterfell at night, draped in furs and winter cloaks, diaphanous clouds amidst the snow flurries, forming shapes where there are none, moulding ghosts from the wind. When Sansa settles into bed that night, staring up at the ceiling that her mother faced when she and all her siblings were born, she thinks of Mother and Father's faces, thinks of Jon telling her those weeks ago at Castle Black: if I don't watch over you, Father's ghost will come back and murder me .

She realises plainly that she doesn't want Jon becoming some apparition too.

* * *

 **iii. Sansa**

 _So lead me back, turn south from that place_

Littlefinger tells her to colour her hair, but she refuses. She dons a hooded cloak to placate him, but tells him firmly - tells him like a Stark - that they should have no-one to fear in the North. They're in Jon's country. In Father's country. Her bright, copper hair should not be out of place amidst the snow.

He knows, as well as she does, that she's wrong. They still have many enemies. Brienne stands a rigid pillar at the corner of their table, just close enough to make Littlefinger squirm, and Sansa revel in the very same. She finds delight in playing him, wicked and sly. It makes her feel less like her mother and father, noble to a fault. She tastes the fleck of Aunt Lyanna's wild streak; feels the itch of Bran's willfulness to climb castle walls when their mother had told him no; jitters her leg with the ragged rush of Arya's deviousness.

She finds sick satisfaction in the thought of being scolded for toying with a grown man, but more in the thought that her lost little sister would be proud that she watches her own back now. No-one can protect her, so she protects herself.

Littlefinger talks without opening his mouth, saying enough in each flash of his gray-green eyes that whip up to find Sansa's icy blue. She schools her face neutral, meeting his gaze every time, and hoping she gives nothing away.

He never talks to her much in public, stretching to offering her his arm when they're not on horseback, and crooking his ear to gossip in tavern corners, but he tends to save his words for the road. He mulls in thought, and she knows that whilst he might not get ammunition from her, he receives it in droves from the prattle of stable hands in Winterfell, the chatter in the kitchens, the crows of ravens on the battlements. In the honest faces of Ser Davos, of Brienne, of Jon himself.

He still licks his lips at the thought of iron - Sansa knows this. He has not asked again for her hand, but he still wants it, and sometimes she contemplates the idea, for the simple reason that Catelyn Stark never would, and never did.

He is forever greedy, and for that, Sansa is thankful. It makes her decision easier, whenever she entertains too long and too vengfully ideas of the Southron kingdoms she swore never to go back to; of the throne room that still haunts her steps, the memory of warm flag beneath her bruised and battered knees; of the shadow Iron Throne.

She remembers Starks aren't greedy. Her father wasn't, her mother wasn't, her Young Wolf brother wasn't. Jon isn't, still wary of the deference he receives from the sorts of men he might once have called Lord or Lady or Brother in Black, still thankful for the wars he has one by chance and God-like luck, still chaste when he kisses her forehead from time to time, a far cry from the taste of Petyr's lips that she still remembers when it's dark. (Sansa is not blind to the fact she has been kissed by only three men in her life, and none of them have been her husbands. Ned would kiss her temple fatherly; Littlefinger upon her lips was greedy; Jon is something different, something like a promise.)

It's why Littlefinger waited for Jon to leave Winterfell before he suggested travelling South for negotiations of fealty at The Twins, in lieu of the demise of Walder Frey; Sansa wonders if the raven received from Dolorous Edd was Littlefinger's in the making, somehow. She doubts it, for the single word upon the parchment that not even Petyr Baelish could've known - Bran - but she keeps her wits about her. When she's not with Jon, when she's not at Winterfell, she's less a Stark to him. She's a Tully. She's Catelyn. He thinks when they're alone, he has a chance at what he wants. He thinks he knows her .

"My Lady," he says then, having stopped eating. He only calls her that when there are ears to hear; Sansa imagines Brienne's fingers tightening on the scabbard of Oathkeeper should she be privy to one of his many my love s or sweetling s that Sansa has learned to bury beneath her as a pedestal. "Is something the matter?"

Sansa realises she has been staring over his shoulder for some time, and she resents giving herself away. If she's any student of his, she should not be letting people she doesn't trust see her so deep in thought.

She prepares to cast her blue eyes back upon his, and tends to a pretty smile - but stops. Over his shoulder, she meets another stare, curious.

There's a girl, no older than fourteen, fifteen years, with green eyes Sansa does not know, with thin eyebrows Sansa does not know, but with an intensity that she does. It's been too many years, but in an instant, she thinks: Arya , and the fake smile on his lips becomes a genuine quirk.

Littlefinger eyes her curiously, his face not betraying him, save for the flash of interest in his narrow stare. He doesn't make the mistake to turn and look at what she's looking at, too attuned to arts like secrecy and subtlety, but he cocks his head as if to ask.

The girl with the green eyes holds Sansa's gaze for a moment, and then turns away, chatting to a man with a non-descript face, holding out a hand to take a swig of ale from his tankard. She has a thin, lithe body, swamped beneath dirty, oily rags, and her mousey-brown hair is coiled up in an unruly braid at the base of her neck. She holds herself like a boy, feet planted firm and shoulders square, and Sansa thinks sister .

The ghosts of Winterfell have followed her here, not at peace with the image of her father disappearing towards the Wall with Jon. He didn't take all their siblings with him; she must be haunted too.

"There's a girl," Sansa offers quietly, "She looks like Arya."

Brienne straightens at Sansa's elbow then, somehow standing more rigid and iron-wrought as she scans the crowd for a familiar face. She scowls, finding none.

"I don't see anyone, my Lady," she says sternly, and Sansa feels a tiny smile begging her lips again. She's been smiling more carelessly since Jon, something within her reminded of the way muscles can move; she hopes Baelish cannot tell the difference between which ones are fake, and which not. She tries to maintain a balance and keep her cover.

"You wouldn't," Sansa says, you do not know her.

* * *

 **iv. Sansa**

 _And close my eyes to my recent disgrace_

"Jon," Sansa says when she hears the still-hesitant knock on her solar door. She can always tell when it's him, and not Baelish, despite the fact they share soft knuckles; Littlefinger doesn't want to be heard; Jon doesn't want to interrupt. "Come in."

He slips through the door a shadow of black, bundled up to the chin in heavy furs taken from the Wall; his hair has grown shaggy again in the time that he's been away from her, and his beard has come in thick. Father's eyes are still there, focussed and grey, but the rest of Ned Stark is clouded in Jon, for once.

Something fond settles in Sansa's stomach. She likes seeing Ned Stark in him, something warm and resolute in the way it always soothes her, takes her back to before the Winter came - but seeing Jon is a brighter spark, always loudest when his eyes crinkle up in a rare smile. (She takes pride in being the only one able to make him laugh amidst all the talk of war.)

When she sees that Jon, it's a reminder that they are not their parents; they are the Starks who survived. The Starks that carried on after all was lost and burned. The Starks who will see this through to Spring again, reborn anew beneath the frost.

He does not smile now, looking worn and weary from his ride. Sansa figures her own travel South still bares upon her face as something pallid and drawn; her and Littlefinger have only been back some days, and they may have only travelled as far as The Neck, but she is exhausted. She wonders if her mother's wrinkles will soon bloom upon her brow. Tonight, the thought makes her frown.

Jon's eyes are flat. Sansa motions for him to sit, and pours him some wine, which he takes with a muffled thank you . Snow melts in his hair and upon his long eyelashes, freckles of white against his dark shroud; he has come straight from his horse upon hearing her summons, no doubt.

She doesn't tell him outright why she has called for him, and that's Baelish talking on her tongue; even now, it makes her feel powerful to know when she holds the cards. She watches as Jon drinks heavily and then heaves a sigh. He turns his gaze to hers, expectantly, and she finds him surprisingly open.

"There was a sighting," he says sullenly, and it sounds like it might pain him. "A scouting party sent East saw a couple of Wildlings emerge through the tunnel at Nightfort. It could have been him. I looked-"

He cuts himself off, biting down hard on his lower lip. His earnestness reminds her of Bran, something wide-eyed and desperate to please. He fixes his eyes on the ceiling, and Sansa knows it's cruel to toy with him. She grabs the open letter from her table, and comes to sit beside her brother, letting her shoulder brush with his, finding him still chilled from the Winter air.

"This arrived not two days ago," she explains quickly, holding the parchment out in her dainty hand, "It bares no name, but I know the hand."

Jon tears his riding gloves off with his teeth - and he's Jon again, her Jon, their Jon, not a spectre haunting the quarters of their dead parents still - and seizes the letter from her hand with surprising gentleness. His eyes flick over the words, and he scowls.

"This is not possible," he breathes, low. Sansa presses out a thin-lipped smile, covering the back of his hand with her own, reassuringly. Her mother would never touch Jon Snow.

"It's Bran," she says, "He's coming home."

* * *

 **v. Jon**

 _'Cause you know my call_

 _And we'll share my all_

 _And our children come and they will hear me roar_

The winds of Winter howl like direwolves around the battlements of Winterfell. Servants shiver in their beds, ducking their heads as they scamper across the courtyards, flinching in their seats over dinner in the great hall, which Jon takes great care to open up for all who pledge a hand to rebuild their home, Sansa's home.

There are few from before - from the old Winterfell, who still double-take whenever they catch him and Sansa walking the corridors beneath flickering candlelight, their heads huddled in private conversation, and who think the Lord and Lady have risen from their slumber in the crypts for a midnight stroll - but many of the squires and footmen are from further South, men of the Riverlands and the Vale, with so little knowledge of cold nights and colder storms, sent North at Jon's call.

On many occasions, when he and Sansa walk the battlements, waiting for the sight of a horse on the horizon bearing their lost brother to appear to them from out of the snow-mist, Jon catches his sister with a private smile upon her lips, a secret joke she has whenever she sees a servant startle themselves into spilling ale down their front when the wind barks just a bit too loud.

"To think they could still be scared of wolves when Ghost lopes around the courtyard as if he is the King here," she explains, when Jon offers her a curious gaze. "It's as if they have never seen or heard a wolf before."

"The winds are harsher here than in the South," Jon remarks, but he cannot conceal his own smile. "They do not share your gift for your mother's stare. She could silence any storm with just one look."

Sansa rolls her eyes, but wiggles her gloved hand into the crook of his arm, stealing his body heat. She doesn't know why Jon brings it up when pieces of the past are still so much an open wound through which the wind can howl. It's as if he wants to stay tormented, if not by the memory of Catelyn, then by the thought he ever deserved to be punished for being less than the rest of them when he has championed so much more.

Maybe he does. Maybe hurting is the easiest way to feel alive. One does not suffer by accident.

"She didn't hate you, Jon," Sansa says, but Jon doesn't reply, only huffing some quietly-disbelieving sound between his lips that clouds like smoke in the cold, night air. She adds, as an afterthought, a repetition of what has been said before, "You are a Stark now."

He knows he wants to say something, but he doesn't quite know what: Do you say it just because I'm the only one left? Do you still think I look like Father? Would he be proud? When will it start to feel like home again?

Jon settles on silence, if only for the sympathy Sansa always shoots his way in a fond, tender glance, some part of her - the real her - that even Petyr Baelish fails to see. He values it; he thrives on it. He never received such pity from Ned, from Robb, from any of his more boisterous siblings. Seven Hells, Catelyn Stark would be turning in her grave, Jon scolds himself for thinking, furious that the bastard who let one boy die and one boy run North should be honoured with the same name as her and them.

But it is Sansa Stark who feels sorrow for him now, not belittling, nor demeaning, but simply honest , and he feels rewarded somehow to be given such a piece of her that he doesn't believe she knows she relinquishes. She cares for him. He wonders when she last cared for anyone.

She guides his hand to curl his fingers over hers that she digs into his forearm, this nightly ritual they have of pacing the battlements some therapeutic consolation to all the things that spin out wide and beyond his control when he sits at the head of the table in the Great Hall and tries to pretend he has provision. He has to be Ned there, and Sansa has told him as much in less words - but here, in the dark, he remembers a slither of what used to be, when he was just her bastard brother.

He doesn't quite touch her hand tonight, of course, because there's a shout from the courtyard, something like his name lost on the wolf wind. Torches flare up in the dark, dancing erratically in the gusts that whip stone walls. There are more shouts from below, and Jon stops their walk, crowding over to the railings to look down.

Men hurry to the gate, their dark figures cutting darker shapes in the night; the torches in their hands leave afterimages amidst the snow that has yet to cease falling, an ever present reminder to Jon of what awaits and what approaches.

Sansa hurries to his side, leaning over the wooden picket, and something burns bright and complicated across her pretty face, like the glint of Valyrian steel in the moonlight. Jon has quickly come to grips with the fact she is far sharper than him; she plays the game as well as any Southron lord he has met, even if those are few and far between.

(He thinks briefly of Catelyn, and her deft choice of words, and then he thinks of Robb, and how he was born for grand decisions, but she is not quite either anymore. Jon supposes Sansa now would be a reckoning for the both of them.)

But then she breathes, "Bran," and it's almost lost to the wind as a sigh and a gasp, but she grips Jon's forearm with something both parts iron and Stark. She is certainly her own breed of wolf now, and in the dark her Winter eyes glow.

They take the stairs two at a time, and Jon almost has the mind to scoop her legs up from under her and carry her against his chest, save for the dignity he doesn't wish to embarrass her of. He settles for grabbing her hand and tugging, but in the end, it's her that pulls so hard that she has him nearly toppling over in the snow.

She lets him go and hikes up her skirts and runs across the courtyard, her red hair like fire behind her where it battles with her simple plait. He remembers the timid, little dove he watched take the Kingsroad with Father all those years ago; she has something wild in her blood now. Some battle. Some steel.

He sees Starks of old in these hallowed halls, but for a glimpse, he sees copper against snow, and hears you know nothing, Jon Snow , and has to stop before he can run after her.

Three horses stagger through the inner gate, snorting loudly and huffing on haughty breaths that mushroom in the whipping air. The first horse, a proud, chestnut gelding, carries a stout looking man in plain travelling clothes, and the second, a white mare, is laden with baggage, but the third is what Jon's stare is drawn to, and what Sansa rushes to, stopping short just barely.

In the torchlight, Jon sees a young woman wrapped in wildling furs, hair wild and unruly, gripping the reigns with a stare protective and defensive, her chest pressed up against the slouched figure of a young man.

A young man. Not a boy. If he were a ghost, he would still be ten and running through the castle halls with a gleeful grin at Catelyn's scolding, dragging poor little Rickon along by the wrist.

It really has been so long.

He remembers himself in time to hurry to Sansa's side in time to hear her fragment over a sob that she tries to keep smothered behind her gloved hand, and he looks from her face, upwards.

His brother Bran stares down at him.

The man on the other horse dismounts somewhere on the edge of Jon's periphery, and calls for the stablehands to bring something upon which to carry Bran - Lord Stark, Jon thinks he hears him call his brother - and the girl with the wild glare seems to soften as she sees Sansa weep.

Jon doesn't know what to say. There's so much to say. Robb and Catelyn. Rickon. The Wall. So many years. Jon is lit with the burning need to apologise .

Bran breaks the silence, his smile wry, but distant.

"Jon," he says, and his voice is nothing like Jon remembers: it's deep and grown, a little like Robb's. "I almost thought you were Father."

The young girl in furs jumps down from the horse, and helps Bran slide from the saddle as one of the stablehands rushes over with a cart that has clearly been brushed of hay in a hurry. The girl lowers Bran into the cart, and then Sansa's clambering for a hug; it fills Jon with the same feeling as having her in his arms at Castle Black, her cold cheek pressed against the skin he had only just begin to reinhabit.

Simultaneously, he feels like weeping, and like he's far, far away, somewhere where he knows reunions like this happen only in the fairytales Sansa used to cherish as a girl. It's unreal. He knows both he and Sansa had given up their only remaining brother for a spectre on the Winter moors.

When Sansa has dried her eyes on her snow-crusted gloves, and sniffled tearfully for some moments, she pulls back and tries to reassemble her stoic face, but Jon puts his hand upon her shoulder and shakes his head, no . Not here, not now. Be you.

There's commotion all around them now, shouts and yells and hollers to the wind: the young Lord Stark is back from the dead! , and Jon thinks that makes two of them. He doesn't hug his brother, but he offers him his hand, and they clench each other in a firm grip around their forearms just before Jon can excuse the tear that leaks his eyes as the fault of the harshness of the wind.

"Winter is coming," Bran says, his deepened voice still unsettling. Sansa has turned to some of the maids who have crept from the kitchen, and is instructing them firmly to have a hot meal prepared, and to make sure furs are laid out in the guest quarters. She is not privy to the fear that passes across Bran's dark eyes, a look which Jon knows he has worn before.

"Winter is here," Jon still says, mimicking Sansa's words from not long ago. Bran shakes his head.

"We need to talk," Bran replies, severely, looking to his companion - Meera Reed, she had introduced herself not moments before - who nods sagely. "Jon, there is something you need to know."

Sansa returns to his side then, and he is thankful for her warmth against his shoulder. Bran is like him: they have both strayed too far beyond the points of the compass, seen things no living man should see, forgotten the walls of home. He realises astutely that he's not sure he knows the man who sits before him, any more than he knew Sansa when she was a girl. The winds have since changed.

Sansa realises she has returned amidst a conversation, and looks between the girl, Jon, and her true brother with the slightest of frowns dampening the glee behind her eyes. She's about to say something proper - about moving inside, out of the storm, eating a hot meal, returning to the Great Hall - when she stops.

The man from the chestnut horse approaches from Bran's flank; Jon notices instantly that he walks like a nobleman, shoulders squared, paces sure, and chin aloft. His hair is a dirty brown, and his jaw is swept with stubble, but Jon does not know him.

Sansa, of course, with her lessons, and her duties, and her sharpness, is wiser.

"Lord Reed," she says, to which the man, who matches Jon height for height, drops into a low bow.

"Jon," Bran interrupts decisively, restlessness and impatience in his tone, eyes on Jon. There is something steadfast there, and it reminds him of Ned and his heavy, unbreakable gaze. "This is Meera's father, Howland Reed. Is there somewhere we can talk?"

* * *

 **vi. Jon**

 _But I will hold as long as you like_

 _Just promise me we'll be alright_

Winterfell is a flourish for the first time in a long time. Wear and heavy-hearts had presided over the walls for many months after the defeat of the Boltons, but now there is lively chatter and quickened paces through the snow that make the castle a home once again lived in. People fill the hollows once carved out by death and ruin.

Jon doesn't confine himself to his quarters - Robb's quarters, they're still Robb's, now even less Jon's than they could ever be - but he wanders the battlements and the spooked corridors with the possession of a White, aimless and blank-eyed.

Ser Davos sits in the Great Hall with Sansa and Bran and Littlefinger, and tries to fill the mantle of the King in the North who should never have been bestowed the title, but Jon finds himself unable to heave open the heavy, cedarwood doors and take the seat left empty for him amidst the siblings that are no longer his.

Jon watches fatigue drag down the eyes of the Onion Knight, and resents himself ever further. He catches Littlefinger's scheming stare on the back of his neck as a prickle. He sees something change in the blue glare of Sansa's ladyknight, changing from cold acknowledgement to- to something else? Is it pity? Is it hate?

He avoids the eyes of Howland Reed, who wanders just as restlessly throughout the castle, the best friend of his- Gods . He cannot think it. The best friend of Eddard Stark.

Jon makes the mistake of hearing Sansa give Bran the news about Rickon, straying past her solar door when he cannot sleep. He almost knocks, thinking for a moment that he should be there, he should be holding her hand as she unburies the grief they have tried to bare, but-

He is a Stark. But not like he was. Not like the way Stannis Baratheon had promised to him, so many moons ago, beneath the blue shadow of the Wall. Not like the way Sansa had told him primly upon the battlements the day they sent the Red Woman away. Not like the way the lords of the frozen North had bowed their knees and raised their swords despite a bastard son, and proclaimed him King in the North.

It is not Eddard Stark who has returned to Winterfell; it is the wolves who have come again. Jon wishes he could believe it enough to settle his heart. He still sees flashes of Catelyn, and Robb, and Arya, and Rickon - pieces of each of them in Sansa and Bran - but he has lost the ghost of Ned, and has nothing with which to replace him.

Jon Snow did not know his parents. Jon Stark did not know a woman named Lyanna. Jon Targaryen did not know-

It's not a thought he can even finish. He longs to be haunted again.

He turns away from Sansa's door, unsure how long he has stood there, and finds himself longing for the Black, for one inconsolable moment. He longs for the cold, the numbness in his fingers and toes, the sole thought of survival. He longs to be no-one once again.

"Jon."

He startles, despite himself. He is not himself. He's not quite sure who that ever was.

"Bran will sleep in Mother and Father's quarters tonight," Sansa says softly, slipping through the crack in her solar door. "I have told him I will take my old rooms."

Jon nods, says nothing. She has the threads of her long, copper hair pulled back from her face and tied in a simple braid. The collar of her dress is done up to her chin. Her face seems drawn.

She appears more Catelyn Stark than she has ever been. He wonders if it will be cousin now, and she will forget how to use his name. Jon feels wretched; Sansa's face sours.

"Come, Jon," she says decisively, taking his arm by force. He does not protest, letting himself be dragged along the wooden floorboards, beneath old stone doorways, and across untarnished snow, before the cast iron gates of the one place he never looked in all the years once spent living the lie he never knew.

He has dreamt of the crypt many times since leaving Winterfell, and many more since returning, but for different reasons. Darkness clings at the corners of his mind, thick and dark and saturated, akin to the expanse of nothing he had once confessed to Ser Davos and the Red Woman in the Lord Commander's quarters at Castle Black.

Sansa doesn't relent, pushing the gates to the crypt open herself with great exertion. She takes a torch from the wall, but does not hand it to Jon when he offers, leading the way with determined steps. Away from onlookers, away from shadowing knights and scheming lords, she takes his hand in hers, skin against skin.

The crypts are dark and dank and cold, wet with snow runoff that has crept through cracks in the walls and ceiling. Stone Kings stare down at Jon from either side of the cavern, great direwolves curled at their feet, whispering things that sound too much like: there is not a place for you here.

And quite, Jon thinks, he might as well have white hair and purple eyes. Perhaps it would be less cruel than baiting him with what he thought he had.

Sansa slows to a stop before the stone statue of a woman adorned in a crown of flowers. At the statue's feet lies a bundle of blue roses from the glass garden. Jon frowns.

"Who did that?"

"I did," Sansa replies swiftly, "I brought them here yesterday. I wished to pay my respects. Do you know the story of the Tourney at Harrenhal?"

"Of course," Jon nods, ducking his head. The blue petals are stark against the damp stone, delicate against the heavy-hewn granite. "Everyone knows the story."

Sansa smiles flatly, bringing the torch closer to the tomb, casting black shadows across the stone.

"They say Arya looked the most like her," she says fondly, "Maybe you do too."

Jon thinks of Arya then, recalling how she had so often played hide-and-seek amidst the empty crypts, squealing in delight every time Robb would jump out at her, or she managed to find Bran first.

She is undoubtedly not that same person any more, wherever she is now. Jon feels little comfort.

"Jon."

"All my life, I have wished to know my mother," he says briskly, "Before you left for King's Landing, your- your father told me that he would tell me about her the next time we saw one another. I had so many questions. But it is my father it turns out I do not know."

"Your father is Eddard Stark," Sansa says sternly, "Not in blood. But in all the things that matter, Jon. You are a Stark. You are our family ."

"This changes everything, Sansa," he murmurs. Arya, Bran, Lady Stark, Father - they have all changed from what he remembers. Bran is older, Arya is gone, Catelyn was as much in the dark as him. Ned Stark was keeping a promise. "No place is set for me here."

"No, Jon," Sansa says then, setting her torch down in a rusted bracket fixed to the wall. She turns to him, taken his other hand in hers. Firelight dances across her face, kissing her white skin and tangling within her hair. "Aunt Lyanna was a Stark of Winterfell. She was your mother. This is her place, and this is your place, like it is my place, and Bran's place, and Arya's place. Like it is Mother and Father's place. Nothing has changed."

"I do not care whose blood flows in your veins. Bran does not care. Arya - you know what she was like, she would love it, dragons and adventures, and- you would still be her brother. She would not care. The North does not care, Jon," she continues, "They know one King, and his name is Stark."

Jon says nothing, slipping one hand from Sansa's. He steps forward, fingers trailing over the petals of the roses at Lyanna's feet. He can barely feel them beneath his sword-calloused fingers.

He wonders where Rhaegar Targaryen is buried. He vaguely remembers the story - the Battle at the Trident - but he's not sure how he knows. It seems like something the Arya of his past would have boasted about, or even the Sansa he hardly knew might have romanticised in the stories of her gallant knights and princes.

He looks to her now - sole surviving daughter of Catelyn Stark and Ned Stark, proud Tully heritage, heir-apparent to the Vale, twice-wed and twice-widowed, and thinks she is more deserving to be the child of some distant Prince than he. Even now, Jon thinks he should be on his knees, pledging his sword at the feet of Sansa Stark, for all she has suffered. He should be her knight, her queensguard, her protector, not her King. The heroes from her childhood stories are right on her doorstep, carved out of stone. These are no figments of her imagination; no illusions; no daydreams. These are ghosts of great men dead in long-past wars, blood of the dragon, blood of the wolf.

Jon Snow was not raised to be royal; he was not raised to be noble; he was not raised, like Robb, to follow the footsteps of Eddard Stark, on some path towards righteous heroism. He was not raised for dragons and fire and iron thrones in distant Souths.

He was raised a wolf. He only knows how to howl at the moon.

The moon turns her pretty face to him, pulling gently at his hand still clasped in her lithe fingers. He is led away from the tomb of his mother.

The carvings of Ned and Catelyn stand tall and strong and stern at the end of the cavern, side by side in death. Jon wonders why Cat has a statue, but supposes, in the same instance, Sansa had something to do with the fresh granite, given how she raises her chin beneath the stone gaze of her own mother. To Cat's left, lies little Rickon, not three months in the ground, and to Ned's right, is Robb, who died for love and honour, his statue bold and proud.

Sansa holds Jon's hand beneath the figures of her parents, squeezing his fingers tight.

"Bran says we look like them," she says easily, "When he rode in on that horse, he said that he thought for a moment Mother and Father had come out to greet him. But we are not them. We have to let them go. We are Starks, not ghosts, Jon. There is still so much to be done."

The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

* * *

 _And the ghosts that we knew will flicker from view_

 _And we'll live a long life_

* * *

 **Author's Note:** I am absolutely enamoured with the narrative parallels of Jon  & Sansa with Ned & Catelyn, and I basically had a lot of feelings post 609 and 610. I wrote this almost the moment I finished TWOW (the second time), based on a prompt I received in my prompt-fills challenge. The prompt was "tired + nostalgia", which fit perfectly with the Stark angst fest I had been busting to write.

Anyway I wanted to achieve a couple things:

\- Explore the parallel between Jon + Sansa and Ned + Catelyn.

\- Look at how Jon + Sansa see the ghosts of their dead family in each other.

\- Look at how Jon + Sansa try to find who they are beyond their ghosts.

\- Look at how Jon has lost all his relationships he once knew, but gained one he never had with Sansa.

\- Pure wish-fulfilment re: Stark reunions and Howland Reed's secret.

There was meant to be a seventh scene tacked on the end about Arya, but I rewrote it like 3 times and it never sat well, so I scrapped it. But, the idea is that the girl Sansa saw in the tavern was Arya wearing a different face, and yet Sansa still recognised her somehow. And then the last scene was Arya, having worked at Winterfell in the kitchens for some time, watching her siblings in command, finally decides to reveal herself to them. Very wish fulfilment. I don't know if we'll ever see a full-on, all-four-surviving-Starks reunion.

For reference (because I got weird anons about this when I announced I'd be posting this), I wrote this as a platonic relationship between Jon and Sansa. However, if you want to read it romantically, you do you. I deliberately wrote it vague so the reader could interpret how they want. This is purely character study.

The song referenced in the title and throughout is "Ghosts That We Knew" by Mumford & Sons.

Sorry for radio-silence for so long. Still writing fic. Just needed to get this off my chest. Back to SNK soon enough. Please, please, please leave a comment if you have one!


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